BASF Plant Science and VIB Boost Cooperation

This is the third research project, in which BASF Plant Science and the VIB-UGent Department of Plant Systems Biology join forces: earlier this year, both had signed a license agreement on yield increasing genes.

03/09/08 BASF Plant Science and VIB (the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology) has signed a major cooperation agreement. The focus is on plant genetic mechanisms that increase yield and improve tolerance to envi-ronmental stress such as drought and cold. This is the third research project, in which BASF Plant Science and the VIB-UGent Department of Plant Systems Biology join forces: earlier this year, both had signed a license agree-ment on yield increasing genes and extended an existing cooperation project, which aims to optimize the growth process of corn roots to enhance nutrient and water absorption.

The project signed is co-funded by IWT, the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders. “We appreciate the support of IWT, which sees that plant biotechnology can help secure and im-prove yield,” said Hans Kast, President and CEO of BASF Plant Sci-ence. “Drought, for instance, is increasingly becoming a problem for farmers, also in Europe. It is therefore high time that the EU opens its market for ge-netically modified plants.”

The new cooperation will benefit from the expertise of 60 VIB-researchers connected to Ghent University working on the functional and computational analysis of genetic networks responsible for yield increase and stress toler-ance in plants. Researchers at BASF Plant Science’s subsidiary Crop-Design then use a high-throughput screening technology to validate the effect of gene modification on plant growth and yield. As the combination of these two approaches allows for both a broad and deep analysis, genes that have passed the whole process are likely to improve crop yield in the field, not only in corn and rice but also in other crops. The duration of the coopera-tion project has been set for three years.

“Plant yield and stress tolerance are complex. However, the combined exper-tise of CropDesign and VIB will generate a holistic view on the mechanisms that orchestrate these processes to ensure that competitive products will reach the market,” said Dirk Inzé, Scientific Director of the VIB-UGent Department of Plant Systems Biology.

“After our spin-off from VIB, we have maintained strong ties to this center of excellence in plant biotechnology,” said Johan Cardoen, Managing Director of CropDesign. “Our cooperation brings together the complementary skills of both partners and will increase the output of BASF Plant Science’s yield trait discovery pipeline. This is particularly important, as yield is the main value driver in agriculture.”